


Incidents and Accidents

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anthology, F/M, Tags are Listed at the Beginning of Each Chapter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:14:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22776967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: A collection of drabbles, flash fiction and otherwise compact works.Tags for individual stories are listed at the beginning of the chapter. Please read notes where applicable.
Relationships: Cho Chang/Charlie Weasley, Hermione Granger & Tom Riddle, Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy, Neville Longbottom/Pansy Parkinson, Remus Lupin/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Sirius Black/Pansy Parkinson
Comments: 101
Kudos: 352





	1. Table of Contents

**Chapter 2:** _Tastes Just Like Cherry Cola_ , Pansy Parkinson(adult)/Sirius Black, Rated E

 **Chapter 3:** _Saltwater Mango_ , Cho Chang/Charlie Weasley, Rated M

 **Chapter 4:** _I Have Always Lived in the Castle,_ Hermione Granger & Tom Riddle (Gen), Rated T

 **Chapter 5:** _Formal Sitting Room,_ Draco Malfoy/Hermione Granger, Rated M

 **Chapter 6:** _Requisitions,_ Pansy Parkinson/Neville Longbottom, Rated T

 **Chapter 7:** _Asylum Seekers,_ Remus Lupin/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Rated M

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


	2. Tastes Just Like Cherry Cola

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enormous thanks to my FIRST. EVER. BETA. [dreamsofdramione](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bugggghead/pseuds/dreamsofdramione) for letting me know where my meaning was unclear, and for generally being the best possible fandom friend. Thank you. All remaining mistakes and self-indulgent style choices are my own.

**Pairing:** Pansy Parkinson (adult) x Sirius Black

 **Rated E** for language and sexual references

 **Word Count:** 797

 **Tags:** Age difference, Swearing, Explicit sexual references, Cigarettes 

* * *

She’s bent in half, rooting around in the bottom of the fridge for one of her Cokes, and it’s all Sirius can do to not stare at her fucking cunt.

Black knickers, obviously.

_Obviously._

She stands. Leans against the counter. She keeps her dark hair in a French bob and it's a fucking mess every morning. She looks at him that way she does, both direct and indifferent, and pops the tab on the can.

She’s wearing one of Harry’s t-shirts, and Sirius realizes it’s one he bought at a Radiohead show when Harry was still in secondary school. He’s thrown that shirt in the wash himself dozens of times, pulled it from the dryer, folded it, put it in his godson’s goddamned drawer, and now he’s half-hard under the kitchen table because he can see Harry’s girlfriend’s nipples through the faded fabric.

She’s twenty. 

He is not.

Half the Coke goes down that white throat he has absolutely not jerked off to the thought of marking up.

When she’s finished swallowing, she smirks at him. “Breakfast of champions.”

He has a flash of her lying across his bed, in her black knickers and nothing else, reading Vonnegut, and his cock twitches.

Cherry Coke.

It’s cherry.

She’s so loud when Harry fucks her that Sirius invests in a new pair of headphones.

He was young once, too, and he’s never been one to keep quiet about anything, so he says nothing about the noise.

When Harry brings her home, and Sirius hears them crashing up the stairs in the throbbing impatience to fuck that Sirius remembers having himself once, he wears the headphones.

And sometimes, he doesn’t.

Harry brings home a redhead.

She’s relatively quiet.

Sirius wears the headphones anyway.

He doesn’t want to ask. It’s humiliating. He tries to play it casual. He thinks he fails.

“You’re not exclusive?”

Harry looks up from the back of a box of cereal. “With who?”

_Fuck. Don’t make me fucking ask._

“Pansy.”

Harry laughs, hard, and Sirius doesn’t know why.

Except he does know why.

He knows her.

“Pansy doesn’t do exclusive.”

_Fuck._

He’s going to mark up that throat, going to fuck her hard, over the fucking dryer in the morning with her knickers still on— _fuck_ —and put his hand on that white fucking throat that he’s bruised— _he’s_ bruised—and _fuck_ she’s going to be loud, isn’t she, she’s so fucking loud when she comes, and she’s going to come because of him and his cock and his mouth on those tiny, perfect fucking tits, he won’t even take her t-shirt off, he’ll just fuck her like that.

Like that.

He comes so hard he feels like he’s twenty.

He is not.

“That’s disgusting.”

She leans against the kitchen counter while Sirius moves to the garden door with a pack of Marlboros and a lighter in his hand.

He looks down at his cigarettes.

“Yeah?”

When she lifts her arm to take a swallow of her cherry Coke, he watches the hem of Harry’s t-shirt rise.

Her thighs are the gates of Heaven and Sirius wonders if he's lived a good enough life.

She swallows. Wipes her thumb across her lip.

“Yeah.”

He smirks, because fuck anyone who tells him what to do, especially a kid of twenty.

“And that”—he gestures at the can of Coke in her hand—“isn’t?”

She drinks half a dozen a day when she’s here.

“It’s not the same.”

“No?”

“Not at all.”

He turns toward her. She has his attention.

“And how,” he asks, “is it any different?”

She crosses the room to him, and he’s stuck in place.

There are no thoughts at all, for a moment. Her thighs are moving under the hem of her shirt— _Harry’s shirt,_ _fuck my life_ —and he’s become a simple man.

He’s kept his distance, because he doesn’t trust himself, and he certainly doesn’t trust her, but he’s not surprised that she smells like the morning after: sweat and that absolute shite cologne Harry uses when he thinks he’s being smooth.

She smells dirty in the best possible fucking way.

She gets so close he can see the detail of her irises: gold flecks on weathered bronze.

He’d write her poetry. She’d do that to him.

When she grabs the back of his neck, and pulls up on her toes, he tries not to act surprised.

Her mouth is Heaven, and now he is going to Hell.

She licks him, and her tongue is so soft he thinks he’s going to pass out, but he doesn’t.

He opens up for her.

Anything, for her.

She tastes sweet, _intensely_ sweet, like…

She tastes like fucking cherry Coke.

She pulls away, partly. Not completely.

“That’s the difference,” she says. “Can you taste it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


	3. Saltwater Mango

**Pairing:** Charlie Weasley x Cho Chang

**Rated M** for mild sexual references

**Word Count:** 743

**Tags:** Established relationship, fluff, pregnancy

* * *

“Like this.” Charlie bends over and a stream of saltwater pours from his nostrils onto the shifting shadows of the palm leaves on the back porch.

Zhi watches, then tips herself over. Her laugh is always big and unencumbered and it’s doubly so when she repeats her father’s performance and snorts out a line of clear mucus.

“How were the waves?” asks Cho, sliding a spoon around the inside of a mango skin and popping out the cubes into a bowl. “No! Back out! You’re dripping!” Cho points Zhi outside again where Charlie grabs her by the head with a towel and aggressively scrubs her until she breaks free and dives for her place at the table.

She doesn’t have any siblings yet, but at six she shovels food into her mouth like a true Weasley, which she is. She has black hair and sea glass blue eyes, and she’s covered with freckles and afraid of nothing. She’s been begging Charlie to take her to see his dragons for weeks. Cho knows he’ll give in, and that she’ll fret when he does, but that they’ll both come out only slightly singed.

“Surf was excellent,” says Charlie. When he presses his chest against Cho’s back and brings his arms around her waist, she feels a responding jump and wriggle inside her. “How are you? And _you_?” he asks, spreading his large hand over the swell in Cho’s lower belly. She will never get over how soft his rough hands are, or how much she wants them on her, and inside her, and threaded through her own.

He's sat patiently for Zhi every morning this week while she brushes out his hair and puts it in two braids, tied off with pink and aquamarine and bright yellow loops. Water drips off the tips of them onto Cho’s shoulder when he starts mouthing at the side of her neck.

“You’re dripping on me,” she says, and he chuckles.

“Do you mind?”

“No.”

“Mmmm.” His warm lips find her ear, and when he flicks his tongue against the back of her lobe Cho bites back a gasp.

“ZhiZhi do you want to go over to Nana’s for a bit?” she asks.

“Yeah, I do,” says Zhi in her shifting, citizen-of-the-world accent, chin dripping with mango juice.

“Go and put some dry clothes on, love,” says Charlie.

Cho could hit him when his hand slips down and tugs up the hem of her dress out of view on the other side of the counter. “ _Wait,_ she’ll be off to your mum’s in just a moment.”

It took less convincing than Cho had expected for Molly to join them in Thailand. With regular owls and occasional Portkeys back to Arthur, coaxed by the sun and quiet beaches and her newfound passion for mangosteens, one month stretched into three then into six. Her presence in the cottage behind Charlie and Cho’s bungalow and her eagerness to mind her loud, jocular, big-hearted granddaughter, means that Zhi will get her much pleaded-for sibling in the winter.

“You’ve already done your job, you know,” says Cho, laughing, after Zhi slams through the screen door at the back of the house.

The mango inside her tumbles and kicks.

“I don’t know what you mean,” says Charlie. He turns Cho around and slips her loose linen dress off over her head. For a long moment his mouth passes from one bare, excruciatingly sensitive breast to the next, then he drops to his knees. He presses a series of soft kisses to Cho’s belly, then a harder, warmer one to the front of her cotton knickers. “A man’s work is never done.”

He’s shirtless, his shoulders and arms and belly hard with muscle. Tattoos of dragons he has loved crowd his arms and back, worked around burn scars or warped by them. There are seemingly random images, too, that in complex, private, and in several cases incredibly silly ways represent his siblings and parents and his child.

“Take me to bed,” says Cho, and he does.

A sheer white curtain drifts in through the window, and Cho bites back all the sounds that would carry outside. Her unfocused eyes wander over Charlie’s still-wet braids, the beads of sweat on his forehead, the Chinese character _qiu_ over his heart.

She presses her palm to it. “Mine,” she whispers.

He smiles down at her, eyes glazed, and strokes the only tattoo she has—a corresponding thin black C on her own chest—with his thumb. “Are you mine?” he whispers.

“Completely.”


	4. I Have Always Lived in the Castle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s no sensation in the dark. No thought or feeling.  
> My mind is a vast black lake, still and empty.  
> Awareness drags the tips of its fingers over the surface of the void, forming ripples in its wake.  
> They spread in patient and inevitable arcs that grow so wide they find the shore.  
> I open my eyes, and learn I’ve been asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the spring of 2020, I participated in [The Slytherin Cabal's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSlytherinCabal/pseuds/TheSlytherinCabal) Death By Quill writing competition. In Round Two, the theme was Charms, and my chosen pairing was Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle. The word limit was 3500.
> 
> This is the first piece I wrote to fulfill the prompt, and it felt really tricky and weird and different for me, so I wrote something else instead, [Tommy Played Guitar](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DBQ2020Round2/works/23742388), which ultimately won first place in the round.
> 
> It's a fairly large departure from my other work, a bit dark, creeping more into being poetry. But I still really like this concept, and it was a huge part of my learning process this spring, so I'm sharing it here. 
> 
> The title is a reference to the novel _We Have Always Lived in the Castle_ by Shirley Jackson.

**Pairing:** Hermione Granger & Tom Riddle (Gen), implied Hermione Granger/Theo Nott

 **Rated T** for swearing and references to violence

 **Word Count:** 3,447

 **Tags:** Dark, Unreliable narrator, Mentions of violence, Spare prose

* * *

There’s no sensation in the dark. No thought or feeling.

My mind is a vast black lake, still and empty.

Awareness drags the tips of its fingers over the surface of the void, forming ripples in its wake.

They spread in patient and inevitable arcs that grow so wide they find the shore.

I open my eyes, and learn I’ve been asleep.

* * *

I know that this is a room because it has four walls, but as I walk from one end to the next they expand and contract, and I never reach them.

I can only make them out at all by the corners where they meet, in which blurred shadows move like living things.

I hold out my arms and chase them, grasping and desperate to touch, but I never, ever do.

The quiet in this room is unrelenting.

I scream to fill it, to hear the sound of my own voice, and it echoes off the walls that have no end.

I am satisfied by this, and so I scream until I laugh.

I laugh, and laugh again, and then I shout at the noise to be silent, until I can no longer tell whether I’m hearing myself or the echoes that won’t stop.

* * *

I’m looking for something, but I don’t know what it is.

I’ve been here before.

I know this place.

I know its smell, the damp and dust.

Its walls are made of stone.

I lie on the stone cold floor and tilt my chin.

Overhead there’s a night without stars, pure and limitless.

* * *

I remember a door.

I find it hidden behind the breathing shadows in the corner of the room.

I open it, and beyond, there's a hall.

I walk for long hours, drawing my fingers against the walls, until I come to a door, and go through it.

I find that I'm in my room again.

I hear water running, far away, and I think about what's mine (I’m always thinking about it. Where the  _ fuck _ is it?).

I grow incandescent with want.

It’s not in this room. I’m sure of it, so I run down the hallway for miles, and at the end, there is only my door again.

I hit it with my fist.

I hit it again, and then again, and then again, until there's blood on my hand. On my door. In my eye.

I blink it away, and think of  _ her. _

* * *

She’s in a room that I can’t find.

I think about a new door at the end of the endless hallway, and I find it, just like that.

In this way, I build a castle.

I forget, for a while, about anything else, and wander its halls for days.

There are windows in the walls, looking out onto black.

I curl into a wide stone sill and watch as uninterpretable shapes swim past in the dark.

There is a grand hall with a door I did not imagine, arched and enormous.

It opens into nothing, so I close it.

I climb a staircase that won’t stand still, and follow the sound of running water.

It excites me more than I can possibly say.

* * *

There are weeks when the halls are flooded, and I slither through them easily.

I glide down flights of stairs that stream like waterfalls, and slide into black pools in unlit corridors.

I taste the air, and find my way to the room where I know  _ she _ is.

When I arrive, the room is empty.

“Where is it _? _ ”

I hiss into the space where she ought to be.

Fucking  _ bitch. _

* * *

I remember the sun, and outside my windows, the sky becomes blue.

The shadows in the corners all shrink.

There’s a room in my castle with long, wide tables, and I sit above them, as their king.

I’m at rest in my sun-bleached hall when I hear clicks, soft and regular.

She's coming.

I sit up and wait.

I’m certain that it will be  _ her. _

It will be her, and she'll give me what's mine.

But she comes through my door, and stands near my chair, and she's not who I expect.

She's a woman, not a girl, nearly thirty. She has large dark eyes and wild dark hair curling all around her face.

“Hello.” Her voice is calm.

I’ve forgotten how to speak to all except myself.

I want to tell her that I’d like to kill her, but I remember that I’m not supposed to.

I choose to be polite. “Hello, there.”

“My name is Hermione Granger.”

“Hello, Miss Granger.”

She waits, expectantly, but I say nothing more.

“Do you know your name?” she asks.

I tilt my head to one side. “You’re in my castle.” I smile, which is a movement of the muscles around the mouth. I haven’t done it in a very long time.

“Yes,” she says. “I won’t stay for long. But I’d like to come back again. Would that be alright?”

I consider. “Yes. I’d be delighted.”

I can be quite charming when I want to.

“You’re by yourself here?” she asks. I don’t answer. “Do you need anything?”

I have everything I can think of, except for what I’ve lost _. _

“I’m perfectly alright. Thank you.”

When she leaves, I lean back in my chair.

Light streams from the ceiling. It arcs across my face. I close my eyes in the sun.

“Hermione Granger.” I taste the words.

I practice my smile for her.

* * *

She finds me again in my green room, where the walls never run from me.

I lie on my back on a wide green sofa, and she sits in a deep green chair. Once we’ve said our hellos and shown our smiles, she puts an object on the low table beside me.

“Do you know what this is?” she asks.

I pick it up, and turn it around in my hands.

It’s a long, narrow length of wood. I press its tip hard into my finger. When I pull it away, the pale impression of a circle remains for a moment, and then fades.

“It’s a stick,” I tell her.

Her face is unreadable.

She takes the stick back from me. “Will you tell me about this place?”

I fold my arms behind my head and watch the green light roll across the ceiling in waves.

“I came here to find something,” I say.

“Have you found it yet?”

I’d like to have the stick back.

“No. Not yet. But I will.”

* * *

We sit on a crumbling stone wall.

“Do you know what this is?”

I’m ready this time. “It’s a wand.”

She smiles. “Yes, it is. Would you like this one?”

“I would.” I take it and roll it between my fingers.

She pulls a second wand from her pocket.

A gray feather appears in her fingers, and she places it on the stones between us.

She makes a motion with her wand—a swirl and then a jerk of the tip.

_ “Wingardium Leviosa.” _

The feather rises and circles in the air.

She looks at me. “Would you like to try?”

I narrow my eyes and concentrate. A turn of the wrist, one way, then another.

_ “Wingardium Leviosa.” _

For a moment, I think only of the feather that I’ve commanded to fly.

“Do you know what this is?” she asks.

I do.

It's magic.

* * *

When she’s gone, all I can think of is what I’ve lost.

When she’s here, I begin to forget.

“I’m going to show you some spells,” she says.

She shows me how to draw water from the tip of my wand, then to call a leaf from a nearby tree. I make a stone stop mid-flight after she’s tossed it in the air, and force an iris to bloom on its stem.

“Can I stop your heart?” I put the tip of my wand against the center of her chest.

It’s a mistake—one of the thoughts I’m supposed to keep inside.

She doesn't blink.

“Do you know how old you are?” she asks.

I put down my wand.

There’s a bright yellow finch sitting in the ivy climbing the face of the Clock Tower.

I turn my mouth into a smile for her.

“I’m sixteen, Miss Granger.”

She nods.

* * *

I hear voices.

“—novel approach—”

They come from everywhere.

“—catastrophic damage subsequent to—”

Every part of this castle belongs to me, and they don’t have my permission.

“—unprecedented—”

I cover my ears, but they’re inside of me.

“ _ Shut up! Shut up! SHUT! UP!" _

I close the curtains around my bed, press a pillow over my head, and scream until I gag.

* * *

  
“I hear voices.”

She’s unsurprised. Even pleased.

“What do they say?”

“A man spoke about you. He said that you were brilliant."

Miss Granger smiles. “Would you like to leave here?”

I breathe in. “I’m still looking.”

“Do you suppose what you’ve lost might be found someplace else?”

I know what I’m looking for is here.

“Could I come back? If I wanted?”

“I believe you could,” she says.

I breathe out. “Alright.”

“I’m so glad. I’m going to show you some pictures the next time I come. So you know what you can expect.”

* * *

I forget about what I’ve lost for an entire day.

Instead, I practice my charms.

The ones with my wand, and the other ones, which I rehearse by way of a mirror.

My skin is pale and my hair is dark.

I smile, and smile again, until I look as though I mean it.

* * *

“Do you know what this is?”

I look at the picture, then hand it back. “It’s a building.”

“Mmm.” She tilts her head, and I count the freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Have you heard the word ‘Legilimency’?”

I search through my mind, and find nothing. “No.”

“That’s alright.” She pulls more pictures from the pocket of her green shirt. “Sometime soon, you may find yourself in a room like this one.”

She shows me a bed with stark white linens. A girl in a long green dress.

“I’ll look just as I do now.”

“But I’ll be able to come back  _ here, _ ” I remind her. 

She takes my hand, and I don’t recoil. “I strongly believe that when you sleep, this is the place that you'll go.”

* * *

The castle floods, and I swim from room to room.

I move easily, sinuously, through every dark and impossible space, searching for what’s mine.

In every room, I call out for  _ her. _

She was supposed to give me what I wanted.

I worked hard for it. It’s my right.

While I curve around a narrow bend inside a pipe, I hear a sound.

I stop and listen.

Someone's humming.

* * *

I open my eyes to an unfamiliar dark.

My body feels brittle as glass.

A shape moves across the room, blurred green and white.

I open my mouth to shout at it.

My tongue is thick and sticky. It will not move.

But I make a noise, a wheezing groan, and the shape jumps, and then comes close.

It stands beside my bed and looks down into my face.

It’s a girl, in a green dress, speaking softly to match the dark. “I’m going to call for the Healer.”

I close my eyes.

* * *

Without any trouble, I go home.

The castle is mine, and always will be.

* * *

Miss Granger finds me in a tower filled with empty perches.

We sit apart, each at the ledge of a window with no glass.

“You came to visit me last night,” she says. “I’m sorry I missed you.” She feels something for me that I don’t understand.

I say nothing.

“Would you like to come again?”

I drop a piece of straw from the window and watch it fall. “My mouth is dry when I’m there. I can’t speak.”

She nods. “If that can be fixed?”

“I might.”

“Have you found it yet? What you’re looking for?”

“No.”

She watches me.

I’ll find it.

I’ll never let it go.

* * *

When I open my eyes in the place where she is, I squint against the light.

There’s another blur, green and white, and when I groan around my weighted tongue, the blur calls out.

“Healer Granger!”

Motion unfolds in greens and browns and pale pinks, shifting lights and darks, until she’s near and holding my hand.

“Hello.” She speaks quietly. “You’re here with us.”

She helps me to drink. My mouth and throat are slow and the water spills onto my chest.

“This is Healer Nott,” she says, and a blur beside me resolves into a man, tall and pale and serious. He takes notes with a quill.

“I’m so happy to see you here,” she says.

I want to smile.

I want to charm her.

But my mouth is incredibly weak.

* * *

Miss Granger gives me medicines.

They’re for my blurred vision. My sticky tongue. For my body, which I can only move in painful increments that put me to sleep for days.

Miss Granger speaks to me.

“I’m so glad that you’re awake.”

* * *

When I sleep, I run hard down the slope of bright green grass to the lake beside my castle.

My eyes are clear and my body is strong.

I swim across the surface of the water as it shimmers in the sun.

* * *

At night, in the dark outside my room, Healer Granger and Healer Nott argue in low voices.

“— _ decades ago, _ what purpose could it possibly serve—”

“—under extraordinary pressure from the public.”

“You’ve seen how frail—”

“I’m not saying it’s right—”

“—won’t let them.”

“I think you’ll have to.”

* * *

“Do you know the word ‘Legilimency’?” she asks.

I feel that she’s asked me before.

I close my eyes. My head hurts, and so does my throat, and though I can speak, it’s stilted and hoarse.

“It’s when you’re inside someone else’s head.”

“That’s right. It’s how I visit you in your castle. Would you like me to visit you there again?”

I swallow. “ _ Please. _ ”

* * *

I show her my charms. What I can do with my wand, and the smile that I’ve built just for her.

We sit together in the grass in my courtyard.

I burn my castle. I freeze it.

I make the roses bloom, then silence the air around us.

I’ve imagined a breeze, and as strands of her untameable hair fall into her eyes, she pushes them away with her hand.

* * *

I pretend that I’m asleep while they stand next to my bed, talking in quiet voices.

Healer Nott puts his hand on Miss Granger’s back, and moves his thumb in an arc. 

If I had my wand, I would break his fingers, one by one by one.

* * *

“Some people are going to come and ask you a few questions.”

With my charms, I’ve lifted us to the top of my castle. We watch the sun setting over the trees.

I’m a very powerful wizard. I want her to understand.

“Here, or there?” I say  _ there _ with distaste.

“There.”

“Can I have my wand there?”

“I don’t think so.” She sounds regretful. “I’ll never tire of seeing this.”

The sky is a wall of billowing fire. It's burning just for us.

I want to put my hand at her back, and arc my thumb across the fabric of her shirt.

* * *

My eyes have improved. I can see almost halfway across the room.

The skin on my hands is marked with soft brown spots and drawn across my bones as though there is no muscle underneath.

* * *

Miss Granger watches as two nurses lift me from my bed as easily as lifting a child.

They put me into a chair with wheels, and because I can’t sit on my own they wrap me in a blanket and prop me with pillows and spells.

The skin on my legs is almost translucent.

* * *

The room where my Miss Granger takes me has a wall made of windows, and a table for us to sit.

She pushes me next to a man I don't know, then quietly sits behind me.

The men here have all come to see me. They tell me their names: Potter. Weasley. Diggory.

An inspector. A prosecutor. A defender.

They look neat in their dark, serious suits.

Miss Granger speaks first. “I reiterate that my patient is extremely fragile due to the length of time he's been in care, and the tenuousness of his neurological recovery. If at any point he becomes agitated—”

“Thank you, Healer Granger," says Weasley. “Mr. Diggory and I have reviewed your written recommendations.”

"Can you tell us your name?” Potter asks.

I owe him nothing, and am silent.

Weasley and Diggory take notes.

“Do you know what year it is?” Potter's eyes are bright.

The window looks out onto a courtyard, where a stunted maple tree stands over a small patch of grass.

I choose to answer. “I’ll be seventeen in December.”

Their quills move.

“Please look at this picture.” Potter sets a photograph on the table. “Do you recognize this girl?”

I pick it up and stroke its edge with a finger, and my smile comes all on its own. “It’s  _ her. _ ” 

Potter leans forward. “Can you tell us her name?”

She has brown hair, in pigtails. I show it to Miss Granger. “I’ve been looking for her. I’ll find her soon.”

She doesn’t smile back.

“Do you recognize this object?” Potter reaches into a satchel hanging from the back of his chair, and places what I’ve been looking for on the table.

I drop the photograph and grasp it.

The black leather cover has burned to brown, but I know it all the same. The edges of the pages are crisped to black, and warped and bent from heat. I turn them with great effort, and stare at the words in my hand.

I reach with my magic and feel inside.

I look, and nothing is there.

"Where is it?” I flip through the book until I reach the back cover, then turn it and start again.

“Where is what?” Potter watches Weasley’s scratching quill.

“Where the  _ fuck _ is it?” The book is too heavy for me to hold, and I let it fall from my hands. “What did you do with it?”

“What did I do with what?”

I’ve been looking for it for weeks, for months,  _ for the whole of my solitary life, _ and now that I've found it, it’s empty.

“It’s supposed to have worked!” My ruined voice rises.

“What’s supposed to have worked?”

“I did the research. I found it out. And this  _ bitch _ ”—I point my shaking finger at the picture of Myrtle—”gave me what I needed. Why the  _ fuck _ didn’t it work?”

“Did you, on the 13th of June, 1943, murder Myrtle Warren by means of a basilisk under your command?” Potter’s voice is so sure of itself.

I imagine the sound of running water.

“We haven't agreed to that question,” says Diggory.

“This interview is over.” Miss Granger stands. 

Potter continues. “Did you in the summer of 1943 attempt to turn this journal into a Horcrux containing the soul fragment you obtained through the murder of Myrtle Warren?”

“Where is it?” A string of saliva runs from the corner of my mouth.

“You destroyed it,” says Potter. "You technically survived the attempt, but only just."

I’m going to find my wand. Then I’ll carve his bright green eyes right out of his arrogant face.

“Fucking pointless Muggle bitch!” Drops of spittle rain onto my blankets as I shout. “Fucking know-it-all, heartless, useless Mudblood  _ cunt! _ ”

Miss Granger wheels me from the room.

* * *

She sits beside me in a patch of sunlight, in the grass by the maple tree.

There's a thin length of wood on the ground, and though it's impossible, though it  _ hurts _ , I lean down and pick it up.

I show it to her.

“I’ve found my wand.”

The breeze pushes a curl across her forehead. “It’s a very nice one.”

“Will I stay here? With you?”

“I hope so. I’ve explained that you’re unable to do any harm.”

There’s a charm I’d like to try.

I reach out to her, and press the tip of my wand to her chest.

_ “Avada Kedavra.” _

Nothing happens. I let the stick fall back to the ground.

“You’ll come and see me in my castle,” I tell her.

“I will. Whenever you'd like.”

I close my eyes. The sun is warm on my face.

I find something I'm not looking for.

I open my eyes.

“My name is Tom."

My Miss Granger leans forward, and folds my hand in hers.

“Yes, it is.”

My hand is so old.

I give her my very best smile.

People have always found it charming.


	5. Formal Sitting Room

**Pairing:** Draco Malfoy x Hermione Granger

**Rated M** for mild sexual content

Word Count: 1300

**Tags:** Dad!Draco, Mum!Hermione, Baby!

* * *

“You’ll note that I’ve brought you here to the sitting room, and that’s because we have several important things to discuss without the usual distractions.”

Draco adjusted his posture on the sofa.

The long term goal, he had decided, was to look engaged— _attentive,_ he thought—but at the same time relaxed and approachable. One might have a conversation sitting like this, rather than issue commands, a distinction which he had come to value greatly.

His interlocutor leaned forward from the hips, as though he meant to leave.

“Make no attempt to escape. You’ll recall that I’ve set up wards of all kinds throughout the room. You may test them as much as you like, but you’ll get no further than the threshold if you try to run off.”

Draco adjusted his reading glasses, gathering his thoughts.

He paused.

“Are you looking at these?” He removed his glasses and held them up, where they caught the lamp light. “These are mine. They’re not under any circumstances to be removed from my person. They’re quite fragile.” He tucked the arms back over his ears, and began his speech.

“I know that while your goals and mine may not always align, I recognize that your … ” Draco squinted, recalling the appropriate language “ … feelings are valid. It’s perfectly alright to cry, especially in situations like the one we had in the kitchen just now. For my part, I” —he felt his face contort under the effort, which his conversation partner seemed to find amusing enough to smile about— “was wrong in eating the entire banana. I ought to have asked if you wanted any.”

That part over, Draco moved on.

A _sandwich,_ he’d been told.

Positive feedback to start, then constructive criticism, followed by further positive feedback.

“I’ve noticed that you’ve been working hard on your articulation and vocabulary recently, and I admire your tenacity and perseverance. Your choice to monologue at three o’clock in the morning was disruptive to other members of the household. Your tone and projection are impressive.”

His companion settled back against the cushion behind him and yawned.

Draco moved on. His posture had stiffened, and he took a moment to allow his muscles to relax. 

“You’ll recall our earlier discussions about personal hygiene. I understand that progress in that area is dependent on multiple factors outside of your control, and that you’re doing your best under the circumstances.” He drew in a deep breath. “Know that I love you very much, and always will, no matter what you’ve done.”

He swallowed. The words felt less like foreign objects in his mouth every time he said them, which was the purpose of this exercise.

“I’m very proud of you, son.”

“What are you two up to in here?” Hermione’s voice was laced with fatigue.

She entered the room with her arms wrapped around her waist and her eyes still blinking, fogged with sleep, and slid sideways into Draco’s lap. “Hello.”

“Good afternoon. I take it you fell asleep with your book. How was the nap?” He ran the heel of his hand firmly up her spine, then down again.

“ _Gorgeous._ Thank you so much.”

“Of course.”

She considered Draco’s associate at the other end of the sofa. “I’m trying very hard right now to not be terrified of him falling off the edge.”

Draco scoffed. “I’ve put a sticking charm on his bum, he’s not going anywhere.” He tilted his chin at the baby. “Your mother thinks I’d let you toss yourself off the sofa, Fornax.”

“Stop calling him Fornax, he’s going to think it’s actually his name.” Hermione yawned. “He looks ready for his sleep. What did you two get up to?”

Draco wrapped his arm around Hermione’s waist, and without dislodging her from his lap, leaned forward and grasped the baby around the back with a grip steady and confident from constant repetition.

“What did we do, Dennis?”

“Your name is not Dennis, you poor mouse.” Hermione drew the baby into her arms, where it flattened its cheek against her chest and breathed a world-weary sigh. Hermione sniffed its head. “He smells of fruit.”

“We had peaches, and some avocado, and he said no to the banana, but then changed his mind once I’d eaten the whole thing and got angry with me, because he’s your son.”

“And yours.”

“That’s probably fair. Then we did some scooting, and bashing one’s own father about the head and face with a wooden mallet. After that, we rocked for a bit, and read _Red Dragon, Yellow Dragon, Blue Dragon_ half a dozen times, and then we ate its pages for a while.”

“Did it taste nice?”

“It always does.”

“Mmm.” Hermione ran her palm over the baby’s white-blond curls, then kissed the crown of its head. “And then you came into the formal sitting room to practice—what, entertaining etiquette?”

“Something like that.” Draco stroked a hand through Hermione’s hair, and then began the meticulous and satisfying work of untangling his fingers from it.

“Are you ready for your second sleep, my love?” she whispered into the baby’s scalp.

“He’s had his milk and a fresh nappy just now. I’ll go lie him down.” Draco wrapped his hands around the baby’s ribs, and shifted him onto his own chest. “How far did you get in your book before you fell asleep?”

“Two pages.”

“Maybe now that you’ve napped, you’ll make some headway.”

Draco laid a hand on Hermione’s hip and pushed at her lightly to shift her off his lap.

“ _Or_ … “ she whispered.

He stopped.

His eyes rolled back in his head.

“I’ll never stop loving what this does to you.” She dropped her temple to his shoulder, still circling her thumb in a ghostly touch over the exquisitely sensitive skin of his earlobe.

Draco pulled her hand away with a soft grip on her wrist, and looked at her sidelong.

“You could read your book, _or?_ Go on.”

“Or … ”

As she grasped his right hand and pulled it toward her, he held the baby more firmly with his left.

She guided his hand under the bottom hem of her jumper, then higher, until he took over and made the revolutionary discovery that she wasn’t wearing anything at all underneath.

“ _Or,_ ” she said, “we could do something about the way you look in your reading glasses.”

He clutched at her, one all-encompassing press of his palm and fingers around the perfect curve of her breast, then drew back, dragging his fingertips along her skin, and then—”

She gasped with the pinch.

Draco nodded. “That’s settled, then. I’m going to keep these reading glasses on, no matter what they might be doing to my eyes, go and put Griffin in his cot—”

“Griffin was a serious suggestion, which you were incredibly rude about.” Hermione’s voice had taken on a frayed, breathless quality. “It’s horrible of you to bring it up.” She arched her chest against his hand. “If we’d gone with your system he could have been Bootes. Reticulum. Triang— _oh, gods,_ that feels good.”

“Does it? I’m glad to hear it.” He removed his hand from her jumper, and slid it down along the warm skin of her belly. “I’m going to go and put our very beautiful son, with his very beautiful, very Muggle name, in his cot—”

“Are you?” Hermione’s eyes expressed something quite apart from sleepiness.

“And then I’m going to come back here—”

He slid his hand beneath the waistband of the cotton pajama bottoms she lounged about the house in, and which inexplicably turned him on, but stopped a wicked inch above where she might have liked his journey to end.

“And then what?” she asked.

He thrilled at her obvious impatience, advertised in the pitch of her voice, the color blooming over her cheeks, and the tension of her efforts to not roll her hips up into his hand.

The baby made his customary sigh at the advent of sleep.

Draco cupped the baby’s head in his palm, holding him tight to his shoulder, and leaned in close to Hermione’s ear.

“And _then,_ I’m going to teach you some entertaining etiquette.”


	6. Requisitions

**Pairing:** Pansy Parkinson x Neville Longbottom

**Rated T** for language and sexual references

**Word Count:** 2,000

**Tags:** WWII AU, unplanned pregnancy, mentions of wartime, Tumblr drabble asks

**Prompt:** "I'm pregnant."

* * *

_Wiltshire, May 1944_

“I’ve had a letter.”

Lavender’s voice dipped to a conspiratorial low, as though a letter was a secret Pansy both had an interest in and ought to be party to.

“From which one?”

Pansy shut off all attention to Lavender and inspected the label on a bottle of morphine tablets. Finding it sound, she filed it away in the back of the second shelf from the top in the medicine cabinet, and made a sharp graphite tick on the inventory form. 

“Lieutenant McLaggen. The fellow from Dunfermline. Oh, thank you.” Lavender received a wrapped bundle from one of the laundry girls, and set it down on the center of the table on the opposite side of the room. “He’s going to be in London next month, and wants me to come over on the train.”

Ticking at her form, Pansy fitted away a third vial, made another tick, and then filed a fourth in a martial row moving forward in the cabinet.

“You need to be careful with all that,” she said.

“Oh, I am.” Lavender checked the tag on the laundry. “I might seem silly, but I’m not daft.” 

Pansy scraped her pencil so hard against her form that it tore a small hole in the page.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“You alright?” Lavender asked, hand paused at the task of untucking the edges of the bundle.

“I’m fine.”

Lavender laid out the wrapping, removed a stack of cloth face masks, and set them on the shelf in front of her. “It’s only you look a bit flushed, Pans.”

Pansy tightened the aperture of her attention down to a ruthless diameter, wide enough for only the minute detail of dates printed on pasted labels and the tick of her freshly sharpened pencil.

Once the old bottles were secured at the front of the shelf and the new ones filed behind them, Pansy closed the cabinet doors and brushed her hands against the cotton of her pinafore.

“I’m going to get some air,” she said, her shoulder nearly glancing against Lavender’s on her way out the door.

“Alright, love,” Lavender called after her. “I’ll tell you about the letter I’ve had from Second Lieutenant Creevey when you’ve come back.”

For a long while, Pansy had thought of the hospital as a cheap robe hung on the exalted bones of Thornwood Abbey. The war would end, and it would fall away as immaterial and disposable as the wrapping on a parcel.

No stain, no echo, no vibration of its requisition would be left behind.

It would be her sanctuary once again, and only hers, free to take her tea in solitary silence by the large window in the drawing room, watching the mallards dabble in the lake.

As it was, the drawing room was filled with men who sent up prayers of gratitude to God if they woke with nothing worse than a headache from the anesthetic.

Day by day, Pansy felt the memory of her home drain away, replaced as it needed to be by the urgent and essential now.

She passed Daphne in the hall outside the room where the servants used to eat their dinner. She intended to keep up her pace and offer nothing beyond a tip of her head, but Daphne slipped her hand into the crook of Pansy’s elbow. 

“Your captain is looking for you,” she said quietly. “I’ve tried to deflect him, but I think he’s gone to Pomfrey already and knows you’re here.”

A voltaic shimmer traveled down the surface of Pansy’s skin and back up again.

“Fucking hell.”

Pansy turned around and stalked off in the other direction, abandoning the idea of a turn around the rose garden.

She nearly escaped to the nurse’s dormitory that was once her own, solitary boudoir.

But naturally he recalled the narrow service stairs in the east wing, and opened the door to descend just as she arrived at the top.

“Pansy,” he said, almost breathless with a sort of half-panic. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Neville.”

He held his hat at his side, pinched between his spare, muscled fingers.

His hair was never fully tamed, and the impacts of having put his hat on his head and then removing it again made themselves clear.

Pansy flattened herself against the wall of the confining stairwell, grasping her own forearms in her palms behind her back.

“Well?” she asked. She pursed her lips and lifted her chin, fluidly performing the impatience and imperious nonchalance that constituted the entirety of her personality as far as most people were concerned.

“I’m leaving.” He breathed in, an intake of air meant to fortify and compose. “Today. Just now, actually.”

His dark eyes scanned her own, but her vision caught on the pink line of scar tissue running from below his left ear, over his cheekbone, through the outside third of his left eyebrow, then turning back to end in a jagged half circle at the hairline at his left temple.

The scar and a Victoria Cross he kept folded in a handkerchief at the back of his top bureau drawer were the only mementos he had been given for a wound that had done everything in its power to end his life.

The desire to trace it with her fingertips flooded her so forcefully that she pinched the skin of both her arms hard with her fingernails to override it, sucking in a breath through her nose at the sting of it.

“I wish you all the luck, then, Captain,” she said, leaning hard into the clipped tones of her breeding to mask the quaver in her throat.

“Pansy, _please._ ”

She might have persisted—would have persisted—had he been any other man, but his hand was at her hip, and then his elbow was crooked behind her nape, and she was in his arms, sighing against the mouth that had been mercifully spared of injury for her own selfish, covetous, unappeasable use.

“I’m going to write to you,” he muttered against her jaw.

“I told you. I won’t read them.”

“I don’t care.”

Pansy took his hand in hers, and folded it over her breast.

She might have known better. Should have known better.

He made her mindless with want.

His hand closed hard, in the way that she liked best, over her too-tender breast, and she gasped with the pain of it.

He pulled back instantly, skin flushed and lips heated for her, and stared at her with an expression of hurt and confusion that she hated, instantly and forever.

“Pans, I’m so sorry. I—”

She prayed, earnestly, fervently, for his stupidity.

But there was only one time she’d known him to be a fool.

His thinking was both careful and thorough, and after a moment his skin paled.

“You’ve been avoiding me for a week,” he said.

She wouldn’t tell him.

She refused.

He would go, and meet the enemy at the door with nothing to remind him of her except the knickers she’d folded into his pocket on the afternoon he’d first taken her, breathless, his scar still red, against the grass bordering the rushes at the edge of the lake.

He would go, and there he _would_ be stupid, beating back disaster with the hard brick of his self-sacrificial love.

Maybe he would come back to find her Miss Parkinson of Thornwood Abbey, sitting in her drawing room with a cup of tea.

Maybe he would come back to find her another man’s wife.

Maybe he would come back with no desire to find her anywhere.

Maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.

“Pansy.”

She was hard as flint.

She was so soft.

She could have told him the hour of the disaster with devastating precision.

Lying on her back, a prohibited object in his bed, she’d been lost with him moving in her, bleary eyes half closed, muting her voice against the sweat at his shoulder, heels at the small of his back holding him tight to her as she gasped out that she loved him.

She had hoped he hadn’t heard, but outside the borders of her own unbearable arc of sensation, she was aware that he’d finished inside her.

If she’d moved immediately after, it might have been possible to have done something, but she couldn’t care about anything beyond how it felt to be held in his arms.

In the dreary dark of the stairs, he studied her with dogged and patient intelligence.

And then his fingertips stroked down her belly, and flexed over the secret below.

He moved quickly then, ducking down and tossing her over his shoulder, and marching with singular purpose up the stairs to the second floor.

Below her, the familiar carpet of her ancestral hall streaked away from the backs of his heels.

He finally stopped at the mahogany door to what was once the least-offered guest bedroom in the east wing, and pushed it open with startling force.

He set her down on her feet in the middle of the room, and tightened one of his long arms around her waist.

The chaplain sat at his desk ramrod straight, auburn hair slicked into an adamant wave over his forehead and spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose. He cradled a pen in his hand, poised over a sheet of paper.

“Captain Longbottom. Nurse Parkinson,” he said, mannerly and terse. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I’m going to need you to marry us, Father Weasley,” said Neville. “Straight away.”

Father Weasley laid his pen down in a strict perpendicular to his page, and folded his hands together at the edge of his desk.

“I’m afraid you’ll need to submit the proper paperwork. Then Major Weasley will have to approve. He’s on leave in Devonshire at the moment,” he said, shifting his pen a millimetre to the right, “and isn’t expected to return until Tuesday.”

“Get Brigadier General Moody to sign off on it. He’s downstairs in the wards.” Neville’s hand tightened on Pansy’s waist. “I’m...that is so say we’re—”

He turned to Pansy, pink-cheeked, eyes shining, and smiled with half his mouth like an absolute clot.

Pansy couldn’t bear to look at him. Instead she stared hard at Father Weasley until he puffed a beleaguered breath through his nostrils.

He looked at the face of his wristwatch, then drew open a drawer at the side of his desk, and pulled out a blank form.

“You’ll need a witness.”

Neville released Pansy’s waist, stalked to the door and stuck his head out.

“Malfoy,” he called out. “You’re needed.”

Half a minute later, Captain Malfoy strolled through the door entirely unbothered, half-eaten apple in hand.

“Hullo. What’s going on then?” he asked.

“Give me your ring,” said Neville.

Malfoy looked down at the emerald ring on his little finger.

“What do you want my ring for, Longbottom? Go and get one of your own.” He looked Pansy up and down. “Where’s your wee cap gone, Pans?” He took an enormous bite of his apple. “I shouldn’t think the priest has it.”

“Father Weasley’s marrying us just now,” said Neville. “You’re needed as witness.”

Malfoy laughed. “What? Right now? What’s the bloody great rush?”

“I’m pregnant, idiot,” said Pansy.

Malfoy’s eyes widened. “Well that’s extremely naughty of you.”

With an effort, he pulled the ring off his finger and tossed it to Neville.

“You’d better have something a fair sight better than that in your vaults, Longbottom. I hope you’re aware that our Pans has champagne taste.”

Pansy brushed a stray hair back from her temple. “Fuck off, Draco.”

While Father Weasley scribed at the form, Pansy tucked her hand in Neville’s, and turned to face him.

“I’m going to write to you,” he said quietly, rolling Draco’s ring in his fingers. “Constantly. I don’t care whether you read them.”

For two weeks, Pansy had watched the mirror with mounting terror.

She’d seen her soft, glassy eyes. Her swelling breasts. The heat rising visibly at the surface of her skin.

Fatigued and faint, nauseated and utterly sick with love and longing, she shifted to fill the open geometry of Neville’s body.

“Normally we’d get two days, Pans, but we’re...I can’t—”

She pulled up on her toes, and his arms tightened around her, lifting her nearly off the floor and into the warm space he kept reserved for her at the side of his neck.

“Were you going to tell me?” he whispered hoarsely.

“You can’t worry,” she muttered against his pulse. “You’re not allowed.”

“I’m going to use every last piece of paper I’m given.” He pressed his face into her hair. “I don’t care if you read a single one.”

Pansy breathed him in, using all of her senses to imprint his form deep into the soft wax of her memory. “I’m going to read them all.”


	7. Asylum Seekers

**Pairing:** Remus Lupin x Narcissa Black Malfoy

**Rated M** for language and sexual references

**Word Count:** 2200

**Tags:** Angst, (arguably totally defensible) infidelity, brief blood, suggestions of violence, swearing, mild sexual content, Tumblr drabble asks

**Prompt:** "Tell me a secret." 

* * *

_Fall, 1978_

The line to fucking another man’s wife is neither a straight nor a moral one. Would it help if I told you that of the two of us, I might be the werewolf, but the monster, unequivocally, is him?

Fucking is the furthest thing from my mind when I see her for the first time since she left school—four, maybe five years before I did. Hollow-boned and apprehensive as a hedgerow bird, she sits with one white hand splayed open on the surface of the table and the other one in her lap, like she’s waiting for one of us to serve her.

Sirius rounds the corner from Andromeda’s kitchen carrying three fingers of Ogden’s, no ice, in a cut crystal glass and sets it down, slow and noiseless, as though she’ll bolt at the sound of the contact.

She picks up the glass with the hand she’s keeping out in the open, drains it, and does it again the moment Sirius refills it.

She smells like whiskey and blood.

Arms looped around her own waist, Andromeda leans in the door frame, Moody talking close at her ear.

The sisters are representative works by the same artist, in two different moods. Andromeda is taller and more substantial: dark, warm and still, a heavy-canopied forest in an abundant summer. Narcissa is hard daylight and the sharp, mythical line of a distant peak, white-capped in perennial snow.

Her eyes are her sole submission to softness; between hers and Andromeda’s, Narcissa’s are the warmer iteration of blue.

Moody mumbles, his face erased of everything but formless intensity, and Andromeda’s vision fixes on Narcissa’s pale, restless hand, the pads of her fingers lighting on the table again, preparing themselves to take flight.

Andromeda mutters, and then she moves, palming something from Moody and taking a seat beside her sister at the scrubbed dining table.

“They’d like you to take this." Her voice comes in at a crawling crescendo, pianissimo to mezzo-piano, then retreats.

She places a vial on the table: Veritaserum, in olive green glass with a tiny cork.

Narcissa pulls in a breath, filling her belly and then her chest, and then she bends away in violent submission toward the floor, her gut belatedly rejecting what I identify as several days of nothing but booze.

Ted arrives at her elbow before she’s finished, carrying a glass of water.

Two glasses, one wet cloth to her mouth, and a full minute later, and Narcissa tips the cork from the top of the vial with her thumb, and drinks it down.

“What do you want to know?”

Her voice is scraped and austere, wounded with whiskey and sick and some other interior, mechanical insult: crying, or screaming, or both.

“Tell the rest of us what you told your sister,” says Moody, turning a chair around at the table and straddling the seat.

Narcissa’s right hand rises from her lap.

For a moment I think she’s wearing an elbow-length glove, like she’s come from a formal ball.

But she’s dressed in nothing more than a thin satin slip, lace-edged, with narrow strings for straps, skating over her unrelenting leanness, either black or dark, dark green.

It's not a glove.

She’s slicked from her fingertips to the curve of her inner elbow with dried and drying blood, a lavish, painterly layer, thick and congealed. It’s an opaque garment of gore, covering everything but a row of four lines where her weakly pigmented skin shows through, like someone has grasped her arm, then drawn their fingers away.

I don’t understand why she looks at me. Between her sister, her cousin, her brother by a hated marriage, Moody and Alice Longbottom nipping at her thumbnail by the window, she settles her wide warm eyes on me.

I watch the tide rise inside her.

I watch it breach the barrier.

I watch her flood.

She closes her glazed fist loosely, fingertips touching her thumb, in the way you would make a compassionate cage of your fingers to carry an injured bird.

“I tried to help.”

* * *

She has a flat in Muggle London that her husband knows nothing about.

It’s small, purchased with her private money in another name. She only has two rooms and a bath, but she’s cleaned it with magic, repaired it, made it sharp and neat and softened it with pale fabrics, made it private, and made it her own.

“Why me?”

It’s the first thing I say, after I’ve come through the door, and just before she closes it behind me.

She doesn’t answer straight away. Instead she pours herself a gin from a cupboard in the galley kitchen, and asks me whether I’d like one. I would, but I tell her no, thank you, and she sits on her sofa, ankles crossed underneath her thighs, and tells me why I’m here.

“Because of the way that Sirius looks at you.”

“And how is that?”

There is so little in the way of the unintentional to her that it’s unnerving.

The tilt of her head isn’t a tick or a quirk. It’s a communication.

I could press the issue, but she and I would both understand the deflection.

Call it what you will in another language, in English there’s only one word for love.

For Sirius, and for me, I believe it’s enough.

“Why not him? Andromeda?”

She’s amused by me.

I can’t help but wonder what else she delights in.

Her hair falls over her shoulder, iced gold against the fabric of her white wool jumper, while I draw a plan of Malfoy Manor to her specifications.

The entry. Staircase. Ballroom. Drawing room. The room where she sleeps. The one Lucius keeps for himself.

Where Tom Riddle lays his head down on the nights he stays.

Where else he might be found.

I don’t push for more than she gives me.

When it’s time to go, I roll the diagram, shrink it down, and shove it into the bottom of my trouser pocket next to my wand.

“Thank you,” I say. “For your honesty.”

She laughs.

* * *

The next time I meet her in her flat, it’s uncomfortably close to a full moon, and I half gag on the smells of two different men clinging to her body.

She’s washed with an intensely herbal soap, but underneath that is a tinge of nervous sweat, and every unctuous, enzymatic marker of sex.

We cover things the Order already knows, and that she knows we know, but we both understand the nature and necessity of what we’re doing.

It’s safer for her, I think, to start slow, without fully understanding why I would care.

“Good luck to you,” she says while my hand finds the doorknob.

She doesn’t bite her lip. There is never a twist to her mouth.

She’s practiced to rote. Her performance of herself is without error.

I turn halfway around.

“Thank you.”

“Of course.”

* * *

I spend the hours of my turning in a vast, borderless desert of physical suffering.

I map it with my own blood, and by the time I wake, it’s a void I can’t recall.

* * *

“Try this.”

She sets a pot of ointment that I can’t afford on the table in front of me.

I leave it behind when I go.

* * *

She keeps rare and beautiful wines that I refuse to drink.

When I arrive at night on a Wednesday, two months into our regular, irregular meetings, she’s so glassy with ethanol that I nearly leave.

I don’t think about what she wears at home.

When she’s here, she dresses down, in satin trousers and jumpers that fall away from her lustrous white shoulders.

I wonder if this is home.

The surface of her wine rolls and coats the interior of her glass as she lowers herself to sit.

My gut pings with anxiety at the unnecessary closeness, but then she leans away, and rests her head on the leather arm of the sofa while her knees fold against the back.

“I’m going to tell you about death,” she says.

I hear the wine on her breath, and lick my own lips.

I take names, where she recalls them. Where she doesn’t, I make ticks beside dates and locations.

She finishes a bottle, and opens another, her thin arms flexing with the turn of a Muggle bottle opener.

Does she feel safe here? With her magical signature tucked away with her wand? It’s folded between the pages of a day-old newspaper, on the table beside a wingback chair neither of us ever sits in. She never so much as glances in its direction.

Half the new bottle disappears inside her.

“He smells like blood when he comes to my bed.” Her performance falters. “Every time.”

I realize, too late, that the curtain has lowered, and that the house lights have come on.

I’m not prepared to see her this way.

“Which one?” I ask.

She smiles, her mouth a narrow bow.

“All of them.”

* * *

I walk home in the dark, staring at my hands.

I feel an urge, sharp and angular and immediate, that I can only explain as the opposite of sexual hunger.

What I want is for my palm against her flesh to cancel and negate every other hand that arrived there before it.

I would smooth my skin against every inch of her.

Outside, and in.

I’m not angry. I don’t know what I am.

I won’t touch her for the world.

I’m desperate for her to ask me to.

* * *

“I can’t be her handler anymore.”

I can’t look at Moody when I say it.

* * *

A week later, Moody glares at me over the rim of a soup spoon.

“She won’t speak to anyone else.”

* * *

I emerge from my next change three kilos lighter.

I couldn’t afford one of them.

In the mirror in the bath, I run my fingertips through the bloody trenches of my ribs.

* * *

“Oh,” I say, dumbly. “You’ve cooked.”

I haven’t seen her since her last drop a month ago, and I’m grateful for the smell of garlic and onions, seeped into everything and overwhelming whatever secrets her body keeps failing to keep from me.

Standing at the Muggle range, she holds a spoon out over her cupped palm.

It’s more shocking than anything she’s ever done.

I open my mouth, and think, briefly, about the weight of a pomegranate seed.

My mouth blooms.

* * *

I don’t know what I need. I look for it inside the cunts of the women I meet in the discos of Muggle London.

They’re sweet, and warm, and smell like cocaine and strong perfume and laboratory hormones, and they feel fine.

They feel fine.

Sometimes when I’m inside them, I think about white-blonde hair and narrow hips.

I think about the time I saw her wearing a single red glove, ending at the inside of her elbow. 

When I’m looking for what I need inside of other women, I think about her.

I’m looking for her.

* * *

“You’re moving too fucking much,” says Moody, never once looking up from his parchment. “Go out.”

He doesn’t make suggestions.

So I go.

The gleaming street reeks of urban petrichor, and the steady incursion of moisture tells me about a new hole in the right side of my left boot.

I’m waxing gibbous inside, something I’ve never tried to explain, but it encompasses something like an unreachable itch, and an ache in the marrow, and a skin-crawling restlessness that I’ve tried exorcising through bone-jarring movement and gallons of liquor, by screaming in train yards and flattening the cilia inside my ears with catastrophic decibels of music, through aggressive sex that turns me into someone I no longer know.

I dance, curled into the form of a brunette with silver eye shadow and no knickers under her shining nylon dress.

I’m stretching my own skin, ready to hurry up the inevitability of what I can already smell between us, when I see her.

She’s wearing a tight silver dress and a glamour that would fool nine out of ten wizards.

Dark hair, dark lips, dark eyes. She’s left her breasts unchanged. Left the unpadded divots of her ribs beneath her constricting dress. Left the perfect lines of her long, long legs.

I follow her out when she goes, and at the mouth of an alleyway I stop five paces behind her, and call out her name.

* * *

She’s already pulling at the frame of my belt buckle, but she asks.

When I fuck her for the first time, against a brick wall behind a bin full of wet newspaper, she’s wearing a face that doesn’t belong to her.

I smooth my hands up her thighs.

I slide my fingers through the pulse of damp between her legs.

I erase anything she needs me to.

* * *

“Was it—”

I’m barely through the door.

An hour later, I wonder if I’ve ever been naked next to a woman.

I have.

I never have.

She lets me in again.

And then again.

Then again.

“Don’t come here if you smell like another man.”

I say it while I’m inside.

She takes shallow, open-mouthed breaths.

“That’s not fair.”

“I know. But I don’t care.”

I extract promises she can’t keep from her flesh while it quivers below mine.

* * *

While my bones construct a wolf from the materials of a man, I leave my body behind me, howling in a voice that isn’t mine.

I find my way into a dream about the scent of her hair, soaked through with both of our sweat.

* * *

“Tell me a secret.” Her open mouth lands against the skin of my belly and then slides closed, a gorging, shapeless kiss. She skirts my aching cock with a generous deliberation. “I’ve told you all of mine.”

“Not all of them,” I say.

I’m panting like a dog, sweating through sheets we ruined three hours ago.

She looks up at me, hair draped over one warm blue eye, the perfect proportions of her mouth still sliding beside my cock, her legs wrapped around my calf, her knickers slipping against my thigh.

* * *

I wrap her secrets in a bow, and pass them along to those who can use them.

I keep my hands buried in her hair.

I keep her secrets for myself.

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/).


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